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Web Site Showcases
American Detective Fiction

Posting all Detective Fiction
Prior to Conan Doyle

Fully Searchable

The mission of the Westminster Detective Library to catalog and make available online all the short fiction dealing with detectives and detection published in the United States before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891).

This site grew out of research for the anthology Early American Detective Stories (McFarland 2008) that I edited with my mentor and colleague LeRoy Lad Panek (1943-2021), winner of two Edgar awards for his contributions to the scholarly field of detective criticism. We uncovered a treasure-trove of forgotten and previously unavailable detective stories, many more than could be included in a single anthology. And so this on-going project was born.

The site includes a working bibliography; full-text copy of entries are added as they are prepared. A few stories that were published in Britain but which appear to have been previously published in America have also been included and are indicated by an asterisk in the bibliography. I welcome comments and solicit both additional bibliographical entries and texts.

Mary M. Bendel-Simso, editor

Select Story

A Night at Bolton Hall

A Governess’ Adventure, Related by Herself.

“A governess’ life monotonous, do you say, may dear? Well, perhaps it may be, as a general rule; but I don’t think any woman’s existence, however quietly and obscurely it may be passed, is ever entirely devoid of adventure. I have been a governess for forty years now, for I am past sixty, though I hardly look it; and I have had some curious things happen to me in the course of these forty years. There are more biographies in the world than ever get written, my dear, and I have often thought that the scenes of my life, if they were told as some people know how to picture them out, wouldn’t make such a very uninteresting book.

“I never told you about the gawky young man, with the neglected education, who fell in love with me, when I was teaching him syntax and prosody, did I? No, nor the widower with seven children who wanted me to go out to India with him, as his wife, at twenty-four hours’ notice? Dear heart alive! I often wonder what has become of them all. But the strangest thing of any, was what happened to me, when I was in old England, years and years before I thought of coming over to this country, my dear.

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Miscellany

The Detective of the Present -- Finn and Jourdan

Time was when a detective was a man who detected things. A detective is still that in some European countries; and he still detects things—in novels. There's Buckett in “Bleak House” who detects Lady Dedlook, and there's that detective in Collin’s story of the “Moon Stone,” quite a detector. New York used to have Old Hayes, who could detect a thing or two; Paris has had Vidocq, and Bow street has had Forster.* But the race has died out entirely in America, and is dying out in England.

Commissioner Jourdan, of Brooklyn, has been making an effort to raise up a detective or two and has actually produced Corr and Bill. Corr and Bill were raised to the Vidocquian task of tracing a mystic murder. Finnan is a hatter; and Finnan has been in States Prison. That ought to be enough for any detective such as Corr to concluded that Finnan did the deed. Edgar A. Poe could not reason out a conclusion clearer than that. So Corr went to where Finnan was making hats.

Is Finnan here? Yes—want to see him?